According to recent safebreach research, “they found the inadequate separation of regular and elevated modes. Folder permissions integrity is not maintained and that opens the door for an attacker with regular user permissions to get the elevated execution of arbitrary code and to gain privilege escalation on the machine“.

Researchers tested the attacks the well known highly-ranked text editors Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Gedit, pico/nano. They have published a research paper with examples.

Here is the scenario “Imagine that an attacker can run the arbitrary code as a sudoer but not elevated, all he needs is to write the malicious plugin in user folder that uses the text editor and wait for the execution of plugin in elevated status”.

The vulnerability has been notified by researchers to vendors and it still remain’s unpatched. Researchers suggested monitoring modifications to the key files and folders presented by adding OSSEC rules.